Actually it should be the opposite. Definitely do your own benchmark, but take a look at the latest numbers from Tyk and compare it with the latest numbers from Kong to get a general idea.

This analysis was done by BBVA comparing Tyk and Kong performance https://www.bbva.com/en/api-gateways-kong-vs-tyk/ - disclosure: I work for Kong, but Kong (the company) had no involvement with the benchmarking in that article.

Those BBVA benchmarks look very very wrong. BBVA achieved 3822 requests per second with a 16Gb server running Tyk.

I used a 16Gb Digital Ocean box, and a separate box to run benchmarks from.

Tyk CE with keyless api.

docker run --rm williamyeh/wrk -t4 -c100 -d1m --latency --timeout 2s http://10.131.45.89:8080/tykbench/get Running 1m test @ http://10.131.45.89:8080/tykbench/get 4 threads and 100 connections Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev Latency 5.79ms 6.97ms 206.76ms 87.28% Req/Sec 6.35k 0.93k 10.89k 74.33% Latency Distribution 50% 3.19ms 75% 6.28ms 90% 15.93ms 99% 31.14ms 1516573 requests in 1.00m, 185.13MB read Requests/sec: 25244.99 Transfer/sec: 3.08MB

As per above results, I got 25,244 requests per second. 90% of requests were served with sub 15ms latency.

Another thing - you can freely scale with Tyk CE as much as you want at no-cost. I currently run 3 gateways in prod and it doesn't cost a penny. The BBVA article states that you need to pay Tyk to scale - simply not true:

>However, if we want to deploy a significantly larger number of microservices, or simply ensure high-tolerance to failure, we need to scale up the number of gateways. In the case of Kong, all it takes is adding a new node and connecting it to the database. With Tyk we can do the same, although it will require us to pay for the service. This could be a determining factor when choosing what API Gateway to use.

I went through process picking API gateway about 3 months ago. Tyk is not without it's warts, but has far more out-of-box features baked in (inc distributed rate limiting) than Kong. And if custom plugins are required, I can choose between lua, python, js or anything that supports gRPC. With Kong - stuck with Lua.... no thank you.

I guess my point here is that if Tyk not performant enough for you, just add another gateway. And if I need custom functionality - I don't need to learn Lua.

The benchmarks for Tyk here seem somewhat off - it doesn’t look like it was set up correctly for production use.

Used Tyk with a similar experience. Generally very happy with it but the documentation was, at the time, a bit challenging.

Hey Bob - you'll be pleased to hear Tyk took that feedback on-board. There is now very comprehensive documentation and user-guides. And true to the Open Source approach, anyone can contribute to them, the community have been great in working to improve them.